Step 8: Grass

I added some more elements like trees, rocks and grasses into the scene. I made the grass with Auto Grass.

The grass was made with the Auto Grass plug-in

Step 9: Light

In this project, I used V-Ray lights. Something I really like to do is use three or more points of light. Whenever I can, I also use a Back Light, because I really like the effect.

In the light settings, the biggest challenge is to control the intensity of light without losing the shadows you want.

This image has three V-Ray lights to create a well-lit environment

Step 10: Render

For rendering, as you might have noticed, I used V-Ray again. I used it with a Gamma setting of 2.2, with the Frame Buffer and GI activated. I usually give the GI Environment a low value.

Well, now it's time to render to get to the final result!

This shows the settings used to create a good render

This image shows the effect of those settings in the previous image

Step 11: Post production

In the post-production work, I worked with the great artist Carlos Sá in Photoshop, and we tried to see if it was necessary to have more vivid colors. For that, we tested some of the various options in the hunter's layers. We duplicated the layer and selected the Overlay mode on the upper layer, and we then saturated some parts of the skin and clothing textures. The main goal was to make it more distinct by making the darks and lights more harmonic.

From high resolution photos of clouds, sky and birds, we built a background that was in harmony with the hunter scene. We tried, in these fusions, to work with shades by integrating the elements in a way that made it impossible to see which parts were photo illustration and which were 3D render.

After this fusion, we did the final necessary retouches for the final render. We spent more time on the hunter's face and we worked on the shades of the skin using color adjustments. In some parts of the hair and the goatee we added fur, and with digital airbrushing we could create a better connection between the hat and the hunter's head, making it look more natural. We also added fur on his hands.

All that was missing was to make the rain of bird's 'dirt' falling from the sky. We illustrated those areas with digital painting and put the traces in to show the movement. In some areas of the hat, we added white splashes and details that could give more credibility to the scene. Lastly, we painted the smoke that goes off the shotgun using an airbrush.